


rivers of blood run through your fingers

by NotSummer



Series: Life and Times of Henrietta Shepard [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Character Death, Child Death, F/F, Future Character Death, Heavy Angst, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 08:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13003746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotSummer/pseuds/NotSummer
Summary: Every time she closes her eyes, the nightmares come. The fear, the anger, the hate: they get harder to hold back. On the Way to Sanctuary, this is one of the worst ones yet.





	rivers of blood run through your fingers

Of all the nightmares Henri has, the one before she visits Sanctuary is the worst. Sam is asleep before Henri, who stays up far longer than she should, reading reports, making notes, sending recommendations to Asari High Command. Asari huntresses and commandos were a similar analogue to N7’s, so she sketched out notes about small strike teams and achieving high priority targets until she was seeing double.

Her head dipping towards her chest as she started to nod off, she shook herself slightly, before tossing the datapad onto the couch, careful not to miss and let it clatter to the floor where it would wake Sam. Perhaps the orange lights affected her. Her waking eyes closed and her dreaming eyes opened, and all she saw was cinders and fire.

There was the child again.

Rationally, she knew her PTSD had latched onto an image to torment her with. Rationally, it was a haunting memory, but nothing more.

Dreams are not a haven for rationality.

She runs, chasing the child, desperate to salvage even one life from the carnage around her. She fights through doubt, fights through the shards of memory warping into the voices of the friends she has lost.

Legion, Mordin, Thane.

She will lose more. She knows this. Knows it in her bones as if it had been carved into them.

She knows this, and she does not stop trying. She keeps running, her armor heavier and heavier, even as her gauntlets cake themselves in the blood of the lost. It’s not her blood, but it might as well be. The undergrowth grabs at her, and it screams in a chorus all too familiar to the weary soldier.

The child runs into the arms of a woman, and she stands, picking him up and whirling him around, their love and joy such a contrast to the carnage of the dying forest. She hears laughter filter through the shrieks of the ding, and her heart  _ wrenches _ . She gets closer, and the woman, dressed in comfortable civilian clothes looks up, her posture tense. Henri skids to a halt as the woman’s body language switches from carer to guardian, and suddenly she can see the woman’s face.

Her face.

Her face on a civilian woman with a happy child, and for a second the future so tangible-.

-A reaper screams above them, and Henri hears the distinctive thrum of the red beam, and she watches herself and the child be obliterated.

She startles awake, nearly sobbing to herself. For a second, she saw a future shining through the encroaching darkness. For a second, she thought she could make it through this.

The Reapers will always be there to remind her.

She looks over at Sam, tracing her girlfriend’s curves under the sheets and watching her eyelashes flutter slightly as she snores softly. She should end this. She can’t. She has to keep believing in the white picket fence at the end. Each day, it gets harder to keep believing, but she will.

For Sam. For her future.


End file.
